Role Reveal 201: Exploring Interdisciplinary Collaboration

By Tim Miller, Dawson College, Krista Bulow, Dawson College, Marie-Ève Dufour, Alyssa Kuzmarov, Maureen MacMahon and Sharon Clegg

At a Glance

Discipline

  • Interdisciplinary
  • Health science

Instructional Level

  • College & CEGEP

Course

  • Physiotherapy Technology – 144-P41-DW
  • Social Service – 388-215-DW

Tasks in Workflow

Social Plane(s)

  • Group
  • Whole Class

Type of Tasks

  • Collecting & seeking information
  • Discussing

Technical Details

Useful Technologies

  • PowerPoint

Class size

  • Small (20-49)

Time

  • Multiple class periods (2-3 classes)

Instructional Purpose

  • Preparation & knowledge activation
  • Application & knowledge building

Overview

The aim of this activity is to have students from Physiotherapy Technology and Social Services showcase the way in which they excecute a patient interview by applying their learnings from the concept of Bio Psycho Social model. These different strategies will be compared and contrasted. This will allow students to understand how each profession fits in the overall care of a patient/client to appreciate what each profession brings to patient care.

In teams, students will be given a case and will need to come up with a list of questions to ask the patient. They will then complete a patient intervention.

This activity takes place in-class during the fourth semester. Since this activity takes place in second year, students have already participated in interdisciplinary activities. The strategy used is role-play which allows the students to work together as a team to provide a patient intervention.

Instructional Objectives

Students will be able to:

  • Identify two new terms about the other profession’s approach to cleint interviews
  • Identify some of the roles of the other profession when dealing with a client
  • Identify types of questions other professions use to interview clients
  • Identify overlapping and complementary aspects to gathering client information as part of a team
  • Work together with a team to develop a list of intervention questions

Workflow & Materials

Workflow

Activity Workflow

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Document

Teacher Resources

Tim Miller

Contributor's Notes

Benefits
Challenges
Tips
Benefits

Communicate, learn and work together with students from different health disciplines.

Challenges
  • Finding a common time where students can meet to complete the activity: Encourage openness with program teachers to moving around schedules for two separate weeks in the semester so that finding a common meeting time is more feasible. As well, have a common time blocked for all disciplines in order to be able to schedule IPE learning opportunities during this time.
  • Finding enough teachers to either act as the patients or facilitate the activity: Send a mass email to all departments looking for volunteers to take part in the activity. As well, encourage each discipline to have committee or point systems which encourages teachers to volunteer for activities outside of their class time. If colleges have a theatre department, students can be hired to play the role of the patient, or professional actors, or pair the activity with a theatre course in a service learning model.
Tips
  • You want to keep the groups small enough so that each student feels like they can collaborate.
  • Facilitators can switch roles to become patients if needed during the activities.

Applied Strategies

Case Studies

Real-life scenarios

Related Activities

Interdisciplinary Health science

Cross-Disciplinary Synergy 101: Uniting Expertise for Success

In teams, students interact, share information on their profession, and create cases where each discipline is needed